I like to think of myself as a hack archaeologist who finds bits of the past (like a National Geographic photo of the moon landing and a photo spread from the March 1992 issue of Vogue) and puts them together in a fictional and illegitimate way while listening to the Velvet Underground. I grew up in Cranbury, where I was always drawing and reading. I dropped out of Princeton High School at the age of sixteen to attend college early in Philadelphia. There, among other things, I discovered the TLA video store, which had a much more varied selection than anything I had seen in the suburbs. It sounds trivial, but seeing all those movies completely expanded my aesthetic thinking. I also borrowed absurd quantities of books from the library and read them as I walked around the city. This, along with a classical education in oil painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and academic education at the University of Pennsylvania, was the beginning of my current style of image-making. My work has also been influenced by Vermeer, Romare Bearden, Joseph Cornell, and the quilts from Gee's Bend, Alabama. More of Samantha's work can be found on her website.